A really early start today on BBC Radio 5 Live with Nicky Campbell and Rachel Burden talking to them about the recent signing of eSport player Dave ByTheWay to Wolfsburg football team. Here's a story about what happened.
Tonight, I appeared on BBC 5 Live, a feature 90min show about the development of digital gaming in football. It was hosted at the National Football Museum and brought together a great cast of expertise in the room, including the England's Captain of the Women's team, Steph Houghton. Here's the show.
This week, I ran a FameLab taster session at the Museum of Science and Industry with Dee-Ann Johnson from Manchester University and Sam Illingworth from Manchester Metropolitan University. It's a wonderful thing that the universities are collaborating on making Manchester a mecca for science communication and the whole event was loads of fun.
I focused my contribution on what I describe as the 10 Commandments of FameLab - a number of principles taken from recent winning performances.
It's a work in progress, but you get the idea. Blatantly reliant on other films, but hopefully done enough to them to make it a worthwhile contribution and a distinct thing, a homage even.
I also spent my time getting the participants to go through a mock FameLab test, filming each other with mobile phones and shooting with a bigger camera, just to get over that first hurdle! We had some great candidates and I think it will be a strong regional heat!
This week, we had a 2 day event for PhD students, to give advice and guidance on how to use social media to build profile, develop research collaborations, and to discover new ideas. My contribution focused around key platforms and how best to use them, covering, Twitter, ResearchGate, Whatsapp, YouTube, Slideshare, Prezi, and we covered ResearcherID and ORCID too.... that said, the main thing was about how social media is a crucial way for academics to get behind the digital revolution, which is transforming what universities do, how they do it, how they relate to the media, publishers, government, and everything. I wanted to show this classic, but I didn't have time...
Last week, I was at the Scottish Government in Edinburgh, for one of our regular meetings of the Ministerial Advisory Group for Digital Participation. It was a really uplifting meeting, focused on the Scottish strategy to get the remaining number of the population online, who presently are not. The strategy is being driven by Fiona Hyslop MSP and is drawing on libraries as a focal point of investment.
There was a sense of needing to revisit the role of libraries for a digital age, make them core to society and communities in ways that many are not. It's a wonderful approach and a privilege to be a part of it.
In December, I interviewed for journalist Fabien Mulot on a feature article for L'Equipe on eSport. It is perhaps the most comprehensive news article on the subject and is a beautiful example of how long form journalism can work well online. Take a peek!
A big story broke this week on Sky News, which has been investigating the rise of DIY steroid labs around the UK. It tells a story of how body building and performance/image enhancement is not just a matter for the world of elite sport to address.
My arguments focused on the cultural shift towards enhancement and the need to re-appraise the morality and law surrounding such practices. If so many people are doing it, it's hard to still claim them as morally bankrupt.
If we can just address the health risks more effectively, then we need not worry. This means a harm reduction model and supervised doping.
This week, I was in Seoul for the 7th eSport World Championships. Recently, I have begun working with the International eSport Federation and they ran their 1st eSport summit during the champs. It was a great chance to air some ideas I have about the field, many of which are in a book I have coming out next year with MIT Press. Here's what happened.
This week, I took part in a panel discussion about the future of hospitals, following this brief:
The Government is committed to a vision for hospital services structured around the needs of patients, both now and in the future. Delegates will explore the need for changes to how we organise and deliver hospital care and treatment that is safe, effective and meets the needs of patients, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
As the constraints on NHS spending continue, coupled with patient’s expectations of safer and higher-quality health care, the need to provide health services differently has never been more crucial.
Under intensifying pressure to change, hospitals are adapting their organisation and services to cope with cuts to financial resources. Simon Stevens, NHS England Chief Executive, has made facing financial challenges a priority. He has also emphasised how frontline staff will be vital to create change and generate innovation to deliver services differently.
A core part of the vision laid out by Simon Stevens in the NHS five year forward view involves hospitals becoming more closely integrated with other forms of care. If the health and social care system is to respond to the changing needs of the population, and also address the financial challenges it faces, all hospitals will need to play a fundamentally different role within local health economies.
Hospitals across the UK and around the world face significant challenges as a result of demographic change, rising demand and a staffing challenges. The changing needs of the population make it increasingly important that hospitals are able to provide high-quality care for people with multiple chronic conditions and complex needs, including but not limited to the growing numbers of frail older people. To respond effectively to these changing needs, health and social care services must be capable of providing ongoing support over time, anticipating and preventing deterioration and exacerbations of existing conditions, and supporting a person’s multiple needs in a well-co-ordinated way.
With all this in mind, hospitals will need to develop new ways of working that span traditional service and organisational boundaries – including working more closely with other hospitals (for example, through alliances and partnerships), and strengthening connections with community-based services such as primary care, social care, community services and mental health. This points towards hospitals playing a more outward-facing role in their local health system, in which they shift
from an organisational focus to a system leadership role, and play a more active part in preventing illness and promoting health in local communities.
What the future hospital will look like and what its central role will be will emerge out of the remnants of a system currently not fit for purpose. The Future of Hospitals Conference will address all the key issues and ask the main question, namely, what will the future hospital look like and how will it operate on a day to day basis
Salford University's Creative Entrepreneur event has become a huge success, with over 400 delegates registered over 1 day. I took part in a panel this year focused on Sport Business 2.0, at which I spoke about the game development community around sports and the growing mobile health market.
Over the last year, I've been working with Dr Mike Wood and Prof Nick Beresford on a NERC funded public engagement project, examining life in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, 30 years later. As part of this, I was in Chernobyl this semester making films about the research consortium behind the work.
This week, the team had a meeting near Oxford at which the films were launched. You can find a play list of them all here, or simply scroll through to see what we did.
This week, I was due to take part in an event in Paris, which was all about how to make cities places of greater intercultural connectedness. However, on Friday, the terrorist attacks in Paris led to my event being cancelled.
For a while, the organizers and the ministry felt that we would go ahead, but the severity of the attacks, coupled with the 3 days of mourning announced by President Hollande led, finally, to it being postponed until the spring. We were only told about this less than 24 hours before I was due to take my flight and, along with other participants and organizers, I felt I still strongly wanted to go. So I did. The event was still cancelled, nobody met, but I wanted to go.
I wanted to go because to not go would have seemed to give in to the terrorists, to accept their disruption to our lives, and to even cease to go about our business for fear of further incidents. To me, it also seemed like the most important time to visit Paris, to show support.
Arriving on the Monday, the city was mostly quietly going about its business. The key sites of the attacks were full of citizens paying their respects, and the media with 24 hour coverage of what was going on. Away from these locations, people were getting on with their Monday, so that's what I did.
I met a wonderful, intelligent French Professor, Bertrand Pullan, with whom I was due to have a conversation within the conference about cities, events, and social change. Instead, we had a lovely lunch in a restaurant he has been visiting for 30 years. We found more common ground in our pursuits, research interests, and way of life than I could ever imagined. His interests were as far reaching as mine and we have led similar lives through academia, good lives. It was a most wonderfully, typical trip to Paris, one of many I have enjoyed over the years.
Strangely enough, I happened to be in Paris on 9/11; I had forgotten about that. It seems I am destined to be with this city in tough times. I'm fine with that. It is a place that shines through all weathers.
Appearance on Sky News talking about the doping debate, in the wake of findings that prevalence is much higher than was previously thought.
It's not every day that you have a meeting with the good and the great in Manchester within a ball pool, but this was that day. Organized by Siemens and the Museum of Science and Industry, a select number of Manchester leaders were brought together to consider how to address the low levels of productivity within the North West.
It was a first step in re-thinking how we collaborate, inspire, and stimuate the economy of the region, at a crucial time in Manchester's history. Ahead of the European City of Science and the Northern Powerhouse debates, this was a fantastic and inspiring conversation which was made all the more remarkable by it taking place in an adult ball pool!
Another big delivery for me within the Manchester Science Festival was the Drone Expo at the Museum of Science and Industry, which took place over the opening weekend of the festival. It was produced in association with my Josh Award for Science Communication and we created a large flying space at MOSI with professional pilots and STEM volunteers to show the public what's happening with this amazing techology.
Well, this is the night when it all comes together, the preview of our Science Jam, our main delivery weekend within Manchester Science Festival. Over the last year, I have been curating a programme of work in the festival as Salford University's contribution. For many of the activities, I've also had some creative oversight and provided direction to some of the amazing people around the projects.
It has been an amazing and exhausting journey to get to this point, but the evening was a great success, with previews of the Royal Photographic Society science prize, the Chernobyl installation, Alienated Life?, and our co-commission exporing electricity and art, Kinetic Flux, produced with artists Paul Miller and Griet Beyaert, along with some science busking and a premiere of a new documentary science film called Traces.
There was so much over this weekend, I'm not sure how to showcase it, but here's a snapshot.
For the first time in Manchester Science Festival, we have produced a 'Science Question Time', which I'd like to make a regular feature within the programme. To address some of the key issues facing science, we brought together a fantastic array of expertise, comprising the following:
Professor Judith Smith, parasitologist,
Dean of the School of Environment and Life Sciences, University of Salford, Manchester
Marieke Navin, physicist and science communicator
Director of Manchester Science Festival
Dr Delphine Ryan, engineer
Ministry of Defence
Gunes Taylor, biologist
University of Oxford
We held the event at the newly opened University Technical College at Media City, in their amazing tv studio, filmed by students. It was a fantastic, wide ranging debate and we'll follow it up with some key statements. The event was produced with the support of the amazing Dr Gary Kerr.
Opening at the National Football Museum this week is a new exhibition I was involved with producing, through my relationship with the museum's artistic director, John O'Shea.
I have worked with John for many years now and he has done amazing work in bioart and new media art. He has brought together an extraordinary exhibition of the last 40 years of football computer games to show how much gaming has evolved and how close art and life now come together.
The exhibition is on until June, so plenty of time to see it. It's worth spending a whole day at least, just to experience the different kinds of game interfaces and appreciate how they have changed over the years.
In advance of #futureday, I worked with Guardian journalist Joanna Goodman to produce a piece that would come out on the day. It was a fantastic chance to talk about how close the film came to realising our world as it is today. Here's the final article - it got the most views on the Guardian for that day and Joanna even came up to Manchester for our sell-out screening.
My slides from the 7th International Olympic Committee Athletes' Forum, which focused on the use of media to empower and enable people. Also, here is the programme from the event.
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